An innovative application for learning to write Chinese characters on smartphones

Abstract

With the fast economic development in China, learning Chinese becomes very popular and significant worldwide. To most foreigners and even local students, one of the major challenges in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences that are considered as crucial in the Chinese culture. However, due to the potentially complex structures of Chinese characters together with their stroke sequences, there were very few available character recognition techniques that can tackle this training task well in a flexible and efficient manner. In this paper, we propose an extendible and intelligent e-learning software based on learning objects to facilitate the learning of writing Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences. Furthermore, the basic features including the evolution and pronunciation of each Chinese character can be encapsulated as part of the learning object metadata to better students' understanding. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, a prototype of our proposed e-learning software was built on smartphones such that students can learn anytime and anywhere. Our proposal represents the first attempt to reduce the complexity while increasing the extendibility of the e-learning software to learn Chinese through learning objects. More importantly, it opens up numerous opportunities for further investigations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.